I’ve read studies that say that “chocolate” is the world’s favourite flavour. That’s not too surprising. Coming from central America after the Spanish conquest, the candy at least quickly was adopted all over Europe and to a lesser degree elsewhere. So did many other new world ingredients, such as corn, beans, squash, chiles, potatoes, vanilla, tomatoes, peanuts and many others. And we’ve seen many of these become common, and even essential ingredients in many overseas cuisines. (I often wonder what Italian meals were like before pasta came from China and tomatoes from the americas!)

But oddly, the tastiest and most complex of the ingredients never got exported in any significant way for savoury cooking. You can find excellent cocao based mole sauces in Mexican and southwest cuisine, but this is to be expected, as the ingredients come from there. Those dishes are centuries old. And if they didn’t exist one might conclude that chocolate only works as a sweet. But it doesn’t. So why did the talented chefs of Europe, India, China, Japan and other places never develop a popular dish with this ingredient, when they did so much with the other new ingredients? I say popular because there certainly are dishes, but they are by and large obscure. Just about every culture has a range of well known potato and tomato dishes, for example.

I’ll presume it’s different. But modern fusion chefs, with fancy tools, knowledge of chemistry and the world’s ingredients should be able to do it. Not just come up with dishes, but come up with something both tasty and simple enough to spread as a popular choice. Though for now we won’t feel too bad having to limit ourselves to French hot chocolate and Belgian truffles.